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Date:      Fri, 21 Jun 1996 11:48:21 +0930 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        tom@sdf.com (Tom Samplonius)
Cc:        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Longer usernames?
Message-ID:  <199606210218.LAA08107@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.93.960620111735.456A-100000@misery.sdf.com> from "Tom Samplonius" at Jun 20, 96 11:26:52 am

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Tom Samplonius stands accused of saying:
> > > 
> > >   What is the general consensus on usernames longer than 8 chars?  I've
> > > been doing some testing on a -stable system with 16 character usernames,
> > > and everything seems to work ok.
> > 
> > NIS won't.
> 
>   Really?  NIS supports databases of arbitrary key-data pairs.  Keys can
> be longer than 8 characters.
> 
>   On FreeBSD systems, long usernames in /var/yp/master.passwd propogate to
> slaves just fine, and if the NIS clients have been built to handle longer
> usernames, those users can login too.

That's the problem though; other hosts that _don't_ support longer usernames
won't be able to interoperate with FreeBSD's NIS.  We might as well call it
NIS++ then 8)  The whole idea behind doing NIS at all is to be able to
work in a mixed environment.

I appreciate your basic idea though; it would be nice to come up with a 
solution that didn't involve a complete rebuild to swap from one to the
other.

> > >   Also, I recently noticed that BSDI 2.1 supports 16 character usernames
> > > too (UT_NAMESIZE is 16).  This means that BSDI 2.1 bins that access wtmp,
> > > utmp, etc will not work under FreeBSD.
> > 
> > What do they do about NIS?  Truncate the usernames? Bad bad bad.
> 
>   BSDI 2.1 doesn't have NIS.

Ah.

> Tom

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
]] High-speed data acquisition and      (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496       [[
]] realtime instrument control          (ph/fax)  +61-8-267-3039        [[
]] Collector of old Unix hardware.      "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick  [[



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